July Clue #1

First clue: This month's movie is one of our favorite Cannon films.

Tape Freaks Presents: July Mystery Movie! Theatres at Mall of America, Thursday, July 16th at 7:30pm, only $5!

Eco-horror Movies Worth Mentioning

Eco-horror is one of our favorite sub-genres and we have too many favorites to write them all up properly, so here are a few more "classics" for you to watch at your own risk.

Day of the Animals (1977, starring Leslie Nielsen): A group of hikers find out the hard way that ozone depletion has caused animals above 5000 ft to go crazy. The bright side: it doesn't seem to affect human animals!

Prophecy (1979, directed by John Frankenheimer): Logging industry pollutants have caused mutations in the forest, including the creation of a giant skinless bear.

Frogs (1972, starring Ray Milland, Sam Elliot): Jason Crockett (Milland) hates nature and poisons any creatures that find themselves on his island. But for his birthday this year, nature has decided to fight back.

Night of the Lepus (1972, staring Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun): A zoologist injects rabbits with mutated blood and hormones in order to disrupt their reproduction. Unfortunately all this does is create giant and bloodthirsty rabbits!

The Happening (2008, starring Mark Wahlberg): Humans are polluting the earth. Trees fight back and Mark Wahlberg has to outrun the wind. (Also his movie will teach you everything you need to know about hotdogs.)

Piranha 3D

Tim's brother lectured me for about an hour for liking Piranha 3D mainly insisting it was a misogynistic movie. After making him watch it (for the first time mind you) he ate every last word. Not only is Piranha 3D a good horror movie, it's a great illustration on how to handle female characters in a horror movie.

The plot unfolds something like this: Sheriff Forester is prepping for the impending spring break invasion of her otherwise sleepy lake town. Her son is hoping to spend the day with a Wild Wild Girl, the spring breakers are hoping to for an insane week-long party, and some scientists are hoping to investigate a freshwater lake that has been opened up after a small earthquake. No one however is hoping for an all out piranha feeding frenzy, and that's all they're getting.

Eco-horror twist: [This is spoilerish, so skip if you wish.] These piranha are released from a deep water cavern that had been sealed off since prehistoric times. Doc Brown -er that is Mr. Carl Goodman, gives us a pretty great line of reasoning for this, while being Christopher Lloyd and amazing.

Feminist elements: The Wild Wild Girls are more than just boob fodder, their characters have backstories, emotional and intellectual range, and are fully aware of what kind of the objectification they're participating in. There's never dialogue about the Wild Wild Girls being emotionally damaged in some way, or that they've been misled about what they're getting into, they're simply using their objectification for their own gain. The Sheriff in town has a MASSIVLY HUGE Deputy, but his mass is never used to suggest that he got the job because he balanced her stature. They work together on screen beautifully, each showing the audience why they choose to work together every day. (And the deputy isn't a just muscle either, he's capable throughout the movie and contributes to the problem solving as much as a deputy would be expected to.) Sheriff Forester isn't just the sheriff either, she's also a single mom of three. Do you know what is never brought up in the film? How she juggles being the sheriff and raising three kids. Not only is dad's absence not noted one single time, there is never any indication that she's in over her head. It's beautiful. The background fodder is loaded with bikini clad chicks, but there's also a fair amount of male swimsuit action (as apposed to fully clothed men and almost nude women). And the mass panic in the third act is actually mass, rather than being relegated to the ladies. And lastly [another mild spoiler here, jump to the next paragraph if you prefer] the sheriff is never saved by any of the men. She is set up as fully capable and saves the day with the aid of the people around her, rather than relying on them to save her from a jam.

Reasons to watch: Strong female characters, more fun than most modern horror while remaining pretty gory, epic cameos, Jerry O’Connell as a sleazy douche bag, it's directed by Alexandre Aja, tremendous effects by Greg Nicotero's crew, and lastly, tons of satisfying piranha kills!

What we learned: You can make “low-brow” horror while treating characters as real people rather than diving headlong into Troma territory.

The Being

It's a wonder Jackie Kong hasn’t made more movies. The Being was our introduction to her small cannon, and though it's not as off the wall as Blood Diner, it's still pretty fun all the way through.

The plot unfolds something like this: A blood lust has been awakened in a being of unknown origin, and it's wreaking havoc on a sleepy Idaho town. This all might have something to do with the power plant openly dumping radiation into the water supply. Then again, Martin Landau insists that those radiation levels are so low it's totally safe to drink. (And he will aggressively insist this stance for anyone with a TV camera.) Never the less, a being has gone on a killing rampage and Martin Landau and the local sheriff have teamed up to put a stop to it before the whole town ends up dead.

The narrators: There are some strange narration choices in this flick. First we're introduced to some classic local-radio-announcer-will-talk-us-through-this-movie narration, almost immediately followed by some local-sheriff’s-inner-monologue-will-talk-us-through-this-movie narration. They both pop up intermittently in the first half of the film, only to be almost abandon during the second half and adds a layer of unintentional fun to the whole thing.

Yup, that's: Martin Landau

That scene reminds us of something: When Martin Landau's character goes on the local news to illustrate how safe radiation is to drink, we were reminded of this interview with a Monsanto Lobbyist who explicitly says their chemicals are safe enough to drink but ends up backpedaling right out of the interview when offered a glass of said chemicals to drink himself. It's quite a thing of beauty.



Epic stunt where someone likely almost died: While the local sheriff is running away from the creature, he finds himself in the perfect position to ditch the creature by jumping the tracks in front of a moving train. We watched that stunt a good 5 times and we can not see how it could have been a camera trick or a composite, it's just a dude, on foot, jumping the tracks in front of a fairly fast moving train. It's grand no one died, but for real, someone could have easily died.

What we learned: Never trust Martin Landau, no matter how much water he drinks.

The Crawlers

This movie is basically the scene from Evil Dead where the tree gets possessed, expanded upon with the same Italian gusto as Troll 2, but without trees sexually assaulting anyone!

The plot unfolds something like this: Josie is returning to her sleepy country hometown after a stint of living in the city. She returns to find her high school flame still carries a torch for her and the whole town is waiting for them to get back together. The town also seems to be experiencing a series of strange deaths that no one but the young will-they-won't-they couple notices. No one that is except one of the nuclear power plant's technicians, but by the time he gets all the pieces put together, it will likely be too late.

Totally a high schooler, not a 35 year old: We've run into many movies that feature adults playing characters that are supposed to be high schoolers. Grown men shave their sideburns above the tops of their ears (creepy), grown women smack gum and roll their eyes, and they all hop, jump, and skip every where they go because they're not adults, they're teenagers. Sometimes this works, or is necessary even, but mostly it's PAINFUL to watch. This movie's "teenagers" fall under the painful-to-watch category. Though no one comes right out and says how old the young couple is, they imply fairly heavily that they are quite young. The sheriff won't listen to them because he “remembers them from high school”, the couple talks about high school in every other scene, they even mention that Josie skipped town when she was only 16 indicating that she's now maybe 20. The lengths they go to convince us they're young makes us believe the actors are probably in their thirties.

Reasons to watch: A sheriff that refuses to listen to anyone. Exponentially better and better tree kill scenes. Effects and acting that will leave you with that “if they can do it, why can't we” feeling. Plot holes filled by “eureka” moments that come so far out of left field they seem like ideas fed to the actors by PAs off screen who are reading ahead in the script. And obviously, trees killing people!

Great, or unintentional: There are several scenes that leave us wondering if actors are trying to get the audience to pick up on some kind of subtext, or if it just seemed that way because they were actually just very awkward.

A double feature that may or may not be amazing: The Crawlers and Squirm.

Deadly Eyes

The Trylon microcinema and Moon Palace Books have an amazing book-and-movie club called “That movie was a book?”. As the name suggests, they read a book and watch a movie that uses the book as source material. Deadly Eyes could be a movie they tackle some day, as it's roughly based on the James Herbert horror novel The Rats. Yes, this giant killer rat movie is based on a giant killer rat book.

The plot unfolds something like this: A city health inspector has discovered a grain storage facility's rat infestation. She orders the effected, steroid boosted, corn to be burned to ensure it won't be consumed by humans. This sensible act has the unanticipated side effect of leaving a population of dachshund sized rats in search of a food supply abundant enough to meet their insatiable hunger. But where will these massive scavengers find their next source for food?

Reasons to watch: A male teacher thwarting a much younger student's advances to pursue a woman his own age! Canadians in the 80s biking in the snow like it's no big deal. Enter the Dragon clips. Fighting off rats with a blowtorch. Did I mention dachshunds dressed up as rats?...

Dachshunds dressed like rats: The special effects crew made a pretty interesting choice when it came to the rat effects. They made individually fitted rat costumes for a small army of dachshunds (and a few terriers) who were only able to work in 5 min bursts over period of 2 hours a day. Whether that worked out to be easier than building mechanical rats we couldn't say for sure, but the effect is spectacularly creepy. There's not an everyday reason to notice how much a dachshund moves like a huge rat, but you can't really forget once know.


“That guy!” moment with: Scatman Crothers!

The director: This is the only horror movie that Robert Clouse directed (and the only horror movie Golden Harvest produced), mostly he directed amazing and amazingly bad action films: Gymkata,  Force: Five, Golden Needles, Black Belt Jones, and Enter the Dragon (again for Holden Harvest, explaining why clips from this movie are featured in Deadly Eyes).

What we learned: Sweaty dachshund wrangler is now on our list of jobs we don't want.

June Clue #3

Clue three: The star of this month's movie is the mother of the star of the blockbuster it rips off.

Tape Freaks Presents: Mystery Movie! Theatres at Mall of America, Thursday, June 18th at 7:30pm, only $5!